Literary Agents and Contemporary Irish Fiction

This essay examines the role played by literary agents in bringing the work of Irish writers into the global marketplace. Adapting Laura McGrath's notion of ‘corporate taste’ (the claim that agents exercise their taste through a synthesis of aesthetic and market imperatives), this essay suggests that in the case of agents of Irish writers, this might usefully be reframed as ‘global taste’. Agents frequently smooth the frictions between the local scenes in which Irish writing tends to be developed, and the global markets that promise to support a sustainable literary career. The essay begins by placing the role of agents in Irish literary culture in historical context and goes on to survey the existing field of Irish authors and their agents. Drawing upon a set of interviews conducted with agents, authors and publishing professionals, it then considers how ‘global taste’ might be experienced by authors. It ends with readings of two contemporary Irish novels to suggest how the stakes of agenting might be inflected by the geographical and imagined distance between Irish authors and the international markets in which their work circulates.